You, yes, YOU, can go to Mars. It's a one way trip though.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...his-one-way-trip-to-mars-is-brought-to-you-by

Personally, I wouldn't be interested in a suicide run even assuming this ever actually happens (which I doubt) and instead it sounds like a scam to collect thousands of applications at $38 each for something which will never actually happen.

Fuck it, I'll do it. I'll be the first Martian novelist.

It won't happen. The costs are staggering, and nobody will meet them, marketing gimmicks notwithstanding.

In fact, I just registered. I'm on the list.

Hmm, Red Mars, anyone?

Tuckerfan would've loved this thread!

Coming in 2014...

The Real Housewives of Olympus Mons!

That's making a really big assumption.

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I mean, you're not a writer after all.

IF it were a certain definite thing, I'd do it. Be among, maybe the FIRST human to walk on Mars.

If they allowed older folks I am sure they would get a bunch of sign ups. Also there is always prisoners for the tests. I am all for that.

A chance to get off'a this rock and escape the mewling hordes of self-absorbed douchebags infesting it? Sign me the fuck up!

Anyone who would (sincerely) sign up for a one-way trip to Mars should be ruled mentally incompetent to undertake it.

I see you're fond of Catch 22.

I'm intrigued by this idea. To be able to go to Mars and 'start' civilization there.

Why? At some point some of your ancestors likely signed up for a one-way trip to North America, that seemed to work out well.

If this idea were ever to get off the ground--and it won't--it would be a miserable and probably short existence for the sap who actually went there. I mean, think about it.

Suppose, I told you that for the rest of your life you would...
...be confined to an area the size of a house,
...have, at most, a small handful of people to interact with,
...never again breath fresh air or hike in a forest or walk on a beach,
...never again eat warm bread or fresh oranges or a juicy steak or ice cream or pizza,
...never feel warm sun on your face again,
...never swim again, probably never bathe in a conventional sense again,
...always be living in fear of a hostile environment that completely surrounds you,
...always be aware that an otherwise minor illness or injury could lead to a suffering death,
...be separated forever from everyone you ever loved or who loved you,
...never have a pet again,
...never ride a bike again, or go for a drive,
...never be able to choose to do something else with your life,
...never have a way home, but, thanks to communications, constantly being reminded of its existence,
...never go on vacation, never change scenery,
...know EXACTLY where you would live out the remainder of your life and where you would ultimately die.

Sound attractive?

Then sign right up.

See my previous post.

Going to Mars isn't like going somewhere else on Earth. You can't walk out on to the plains of Mars, chop down a few trees, build yourself a cabin, catch fish in the local stream, keep livestock, and hunt game. You won't have a town nearby where you can go get supplies or medical attention. There aren't going to be dozens of families homesteading the surrounding parcels.

You will be in an environment in which evolution has not prepared you in any way to survive. You will be completely isolated, live a very meager and limited existence, and will have to remain constantly watchful of your surroundings lest they kill you.

You may as well say you'd go live on a submarine--that never surfaced!--for the rest of your life. The experience would be very similar.

And?

I'm sure plenty of people would say all of that's worth it, considering you'd go down in history and get to see things no one else has ever seen. How many Apollo astronauts went into space or to the moon knowing they might well die horribly?

You'd see the inside of a shelter and through its windows--or, perhaps, through a spacesuit visor--you'd see an endless desert all around you. You'd see that the first day you were there. Then you'd have several thousand days ahead of you to see the exact same thing. There are no tree with leaves to signal the change of seasons on Mars. There are no rainy days, no snowy days. If you're REALLY lucky, you might get a windstorm every now and again. You cannot leave the shelter (and go very far, at least) and there are no vacation spots. Your universe will shrink to the size of the shelter and be limited to the people and things that are in it.

It will get old very, very fast.

Unlike Apollo, the danger in going to Mars on a one-way ticket to a small outpost is not that you may die. It's that you will live. I suspect about six months into the "historic" adventure, any reasonable person would be entertaining thoughts of suicide.

Anyone who thinks this kind of isolation and privation would not be a severe strain has not thought it through.

Imagine living in a jail cell--even a big, comfortable one--for the rest of your life. That's effectively what you would be choosing.

If I were younger an all of my concerns were covered I'd definately have consoderd it.

Maybe next go around, that is if I'm not a crustation.

Yea, but it'd be on fuckin' Mars man!

Well you don't have to fucking go, then.

But plenty of people would.

And that would be AMAZING.

For the first week or two.

Then, after breathing stale air for weeks on end, having to put up with the four annoying assholes you share the shelter with, spending half your time keeping the shelter running, the other half with NOTHING to do, eating condensed food rations, and watching a lot of video of old television shows, you're going to start thinking...

"What in the name of fuck ever possessed me to come to Mars?"

And remember: you CAN'T go back. The technology to bring you back won't even exist.

And, I'm telling you: anyone who would is out of their mind or, at the very least, hasn't fully considered what living on Mars would entail.

500 years from now, Mars will probably be a great place to live. We may even be well on the way to making it Earth-like by then.

But going there TO STAY in the near future?

Horrendously bad idea.

If someone pulled this off--and, again, they won't because the idea is fundamentally flawed--the outpost wouldn't last. Someone would go stir crazy and murder-suicide the whole crew by venting all the air.

ConfederateSon disagrees: The person would run out of O2 and food in short order and then die.

I find your lack of vision disturbing.
Apparently unlike you, I have read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. I'm well aware of the logistical, financial, emotional and psychological hurdles for such an expedition. To wit, in Red Mars, a group of 100 scientists undertook this one-way trip to Mars and had to set up a permanent habitat to survive and set the foundation of the terraforming process. And, despite KSR's very-left leaning stances, the series is very well worth reading.

Daunting list, but again, I'll point to KSR's Red, Green and Blue Mars as a method on how it could be done. "Could," because there are no doubt problems with how he says it could happen, but it's a starting point to begin the discussion.

This was announced well over a year ago, so I don't know why people are getting excited about it now. Its an interesting idea, and I hope they pull it off, though I won't be surprised if it comes to naught. I'm sure they'll be taking one of these along, if they go.

Are we allowed to nominate other people?

I'd go to Mars. "Cohaagen!"

No, no, its not. KSR doesn't have a goddamn clue of what he's talking about, and why his books are so popular is beyond me. Allow me to illustrate flaws in his thinking with two examples.

Item 1: When they arrive on Mars, one of the characters reaches down to touch the surface of the planet. She finds the cold penetrating her glove and thinks to herself, "We're going to have to come up with glove warmers." What KSR fails to realize is that this issue was dealt with long ago. In sunlight, an astronaut's hand is going to be heated to hundreds of degrees, while in shadow, it'll be chilled to almost absolute zero. The suits are designed to keep the astronauts comfortable under such conditions, since they're going to experience them any time they go out into space.

Item 2: Additionally, when the settlers arrive, they're surprised to discover that some of the gear which was sent ahead of them had crashed, instead of landing safely. Anyone who thinks that such equipment wouldn't be designed to "phone home" upon completion of a safe landing is, to put it bluntly, an idiot. Nobody, but nobody, is going to sink that kind of cash into vital gear and not equip it with telemetric equipment so that it can say it made it.

I'm not even going to get into the bullshit about a stowaway (see The Cold Equations for why that's nonsense) or part of the colony striking out on its own, or the shittily designed Russian reactors, or one of the colonists discovering the secret to immortality in the lab on Mars, or, well, you get the idea.

I find it funny that Paladin doesn't like this idea, but completely buys into doing a flyby in 2018.

Not to mention that the little Martian house would quickly fill up with shit because there's no sewer system they can tap into.

I suppose they could bag it up and toss it outside from an airlock, but then the view out the little windows in the house would be, "Hey, there's a bag of shit. There's another one. Ooh! Another one! What does that make now, five thousand of those suckers?"